


harissa and inexorable destiny

by agivise



Category: Metal Gear
Genre: M/M, and i love it just the same, basically this is a disaster of a writing style, but it's MY disaster of a writing style, feat. me talking about mythology i know almost nothing about, zero out of five english teachers recommend
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-06
Updated: 2018-02-06
Packaged: 2019-03-14 13:56:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,368
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13591497
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/agivise/pseuds/agivise
Summary: he’s the only man you’ve ever known to be capable of building a world-killing metal biped without even knowing he’s doing it. you distrust him immensely. you believe every word he tells you.(or, hal and dave cook dinner, and dave reflects)





	harissa and inexorable destiny

**Author's Note:**

> technically i think this is prose poetry? but who knows, i've never paid attention in language arts.  
> basically this is what my writing is like in my head before i usually change it a whole lot to make it palatable, but hey, i wanted to try something different. so here it is. enjoy.  
> also my french is pretty rusty and i don't speak a lick of any other languages so excuse the sloppy translations

often, you feel as if you’re just some fork-tongued thing leaving coiled bruises on ugly throats.

for a long time, a collection of other fork-tongued things gives you a task, and you complete it with some complaint, scrawling red ballpoint x’s across long lists of fake names, monikers clung to for so long that maybe it wouldn’t matter even if they were kept that way, as old lies, on those inexistent gravestones. they’re blessed with epitaphs made of smoke and soliloquies just pretty enough to validate that it was your gun that caused the massive cranial trauma. the very same that lead, over and over, to the halt of a collection of electrochemical signals that maybe once you would’ve thought of as a person rather than just another walking, talking ideology-spitter, had the blandness of being the reaper not drilled itself into your skull so long ago.

does honor mean nothing to you, you serpent? does identity? how could it? yours is the truth, the whole truth, splayed out like a frog to be dissected, but there’s no harm that could come to you from them knowing who you are. this is already all you are. you have no home to target that isn’t already carried with you wherever you go.

maybe the throats you bruise are not ugly until you’re through with them. maybe you’re only seeing yourself by mistake, in the mirror held by perseus, as you stand vigilant and hoping. you witness your mane of serpents, you medusa, you cursed thing, surrounded by statues of people who heard your name and sought glory and saw your dangerous eyes and fell dead, having underestimated the danger held in that same name and those who came before it.

people you love die. people you hate die too. more often than not, death is indiscriminate.

but then you meet the disaster of a man who asks you questions you swear through and through that he stole from the lyric booklet of a cd case or the back cover of a shakespeare play, because otherwise he truly is such a sentimental curiosity that you’ll feel compelled to throw every last world view of yours to the river to capsize and dissolve if only to understand what churns behind his weepy eyes. he’s the only man you’ve ever known to be capable of building a world-killing metal biped without even knowing he’s doing it. you distrust him immensely. you believe every word he tells you.

his name is hal. your name is david. he very rarely calls you that.

he’s the kind of man who might look up words for you to translate from french into english, not to understand the meaning, only to hear you speak them. you’ve been told by others that you pronounce your french words with an appreciable italian accent, because that’s the accent you learned them in, the accent of the man you learned them from, just as you learned russian with a portugeuse cadence and portuguese with a japanese one. the people who taught you to speak and write were many-tongued. if he notices, he never mentions it. you doubt he notices.

“regardez-moi,” you read to him, squinting pale-eyed at his smudged laptop screen. “je suis le fils d'un grand homme. une déesse était ma mère. pourtant la mort et le destin inexorable m'attendent.”

he doesn’t understand a word you say, but he doesn’t mind. you don’t understand why he’s selected a poor translation of an immaterial myth for you to read, but you don’t question him.

you two are a strange pair. you have a secret handshake which you’ve done an exceptionally poor job of keeping secret, made even more laughable by the fact that secret-keeping is, has always been, and will always be your trade. he hates it when you leave lit cigarettes on the porch railing and you hate it when he leaves the fridge open and the milk spoils. you work together, righting wrongs and fixing things, but you both have your own distinct methods, which you often attempt to explain to each other. on occasion, you worry he may leave or die or otherwise vanish from the world, and you suspect he has similar fears. sometimes you feel like eurydice. mostly you feel like orpheus.

you’re a terrible cook. not because you don’t know how, nor that you actually lack the ability, but because you actively avoid following petty things like recipes and suggestions and common sense when you’re the one doing the actual cooking. hal’s a terrible cook too, but in a way exactly opposite to you. he’s a fast learner. you tell him every last recipe you’ve overheard or stumbled across over the years, step by step, in incredible detail. it’s an overwhelming collection. you never realized this until you spoke them aloud.

you recite each of them in the languages you learned them in. you refuse to translate a single word, if only to tease him, but you’ll guide his hands to the right ingredients in hopes that he’ll learn a phrase here and there regardless. teaching him fragments of languages has become a little game of yours. sometimes you’ll point at a tomato and call it by its foreign name-of-the-day, and he’ll repeat what you said back to you, the sounds mangled and deeply american, but charmingly so.

this is a horrible method for preparing meals, but the immersion seems to have rubbed off little bits and pieces of your languages onto him. the stars in his eyes as you speak in tongues makes it all worth it.

he can grasp bits and pieces of food-adjacent spanish now, though it’s taken several burnt croquetas and some incredibly salty migas to get to this point. he’s helplessly unskilled at preparing anything remotely japanese, but you’re not sure whether this is due to his inability to understand a single word in the language or the difficulty of the recipes that you happen to know. you don’t mind. your japanese is rusty anyways.

tonight, you’re working together to make a moroccan soup, which you explain to him repeatedly in your soft, accented french. he’s getting very good at french. you start to wonder if he took a class or two of it back when he was in high school. that was a long time ago.

“non, tu doit mettre l’harissa dans le…“ you forget the word for broth. “la soupe. le liquide de la soupe.”

he asks you what the hell you’re saying, but he asks you in broken french, which couldn’t possibly make you any happier than you already are, though it certainly tries. you smile and sigh and nudge his hand in the right direction.

“le bouilli,” you attempt. “peu importe.”

he asks you if you mean “bouillon”. he’s right, but he only knows this because it’s a word the english language has already stolen like the bird of prey that it is. he teases you, and you tease him.

“vy tozhe mogli by zabyt prostymi slovami, yesli by vy znali desyatok raznykh yazykov,” you taunt, swapping over to a language he couldn’t possibly understand, as you’ve almost never spoken it in front of him. your pronunciation and grammar are atrocious, out of practice, but he’ll never know the difference.

you’re a real hyena sometimes, aren’t you? but you can never phase him. he just rolls his eyes and grins and puts the harissa in the broth. you explain the next step in french once again, and he frowns and asks for an english translation. you raise your brows and smile and repeat it, still in french. he still has no idea what you’re saying, but he makes some guesses as to the rough meaning and does his best to prepare it properly.

you trust him immensely. you definitely don’t sneak correct ingredients into the soup while he’s not looking.

he asks you if you believe in aliens. you don’t. he does. but you like listening to him ramble about the mathematical probabilities of life beyond earth, so you lie and say you’re on the fence. he calls you david, and you melt.

you’re a fork-tongued serpent of a man, sure, but your words are sugar-sweet.

**Author's Note:**

> rough translations:  
> [regardez-moi. je suis le fils d'un grand homme. une déesse était ma mère. pourtant la mort et le destin inexorable m'attendent.] "look at me. i am the son of a great man. a goddess was my mother. yet death and inexorable destiny await me." (quote from achilles or something i can't remember)  
> [non, tu doit mettre l’harissa dans le… la soupe. le liquide de la soupe.] "no, you gotta put the harissa into the... the soup. the liquid of the soup."  
> [le bouilli. peu importe.] "the boiled stuff. whatever."  
> [vy tozhe mogli by zabyt prostymi slovami, yesli by vy znali desyatok raznykh yazykov.] "you'd forget basic words too, if you spoke, like, a dozen languages."
> 
> woo that was interesting to write. comments and kudos are deeply loved and appreciated.


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